Posts in: March, 2016

Being smart is important. But it’s almost never the most vital quality for success at work. And in the library profession—which emphasizes intelligence even more than most—this focus can lead us to undervalue other essential traits.

Think back to a time in your work life that you remember very fondly. To a successful project or a team you truly enjoyed working with. To a story about your job you love to tell. Really. Take a moment and conjure up that situation, because I’m going to make a prediction:

Your memory has nothing to do with highly developed professional skills or intellect.

Member-driven product development

A little more than two years ago, OCLC introduced WorldCat Discovery. The goal was to combine the “best of both worlds” into one discovery service—to deliver a single service that would deliver full discovery of library collections and enable library staff and library users to continue searching the one-of-a-kind WorldCat database.

It was a good plan, and reflected a lot of input from our members at a variety of levels. One of the things that makes OCLC very different is our commitment to member involvement. Not just in terms of tactical, feature-focused feedback, but overall direction and strategy.

Like any plan, however, you often find out more in the execution than you do in the initial development stages.

I just got back from the OCLC EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) Regional Council meeting in Madrid, Spain. It was a great conference with more than 300 attendees from 31 countries. The theme of the event was “The Selfie Generation,” and you can see a ton of fun selfies and other pictures that our members, staff and guests took throughout the week.

At this meeting, OCLC members connected with each other and learned how library users’ needs and expectations are changing. We also had a chance to discuss OCLC services and research work and share what’s going on in members’ libraries and within their communities. This type of engagement stimulates lots of new ideas, encourages future-thinking and allows us to explore solutions together.

At OCLC Regional Council meetings like these, we also get to talk about something that’s unique to OCLC: member representation and voting—the power that OCLC members have to shape the future of the world’s largest library cooperative.

Technology has turned learning outside in

We used to bring all our learning, content and media resources to various “watering holes” where folks would gather to consume it. Classrooms, libraries, newspapers, magazines, TV networks, bookstores and record stores. Why? Because it was the fastest way to distribute a wide variety of materials. It wasn’t wrong. It made sense. But it also left us with embedded cultural and institutional ideas and biases about what learning is, who is involved in our workflows, what counts as “good enough” and even why we learn.